Crafting the perfect Powerpoint presentation

What goes into the perfection powerpoint presentation can be subjective and really depends on what you want your presentation to achieve. There can be many factors, but let's start by laying out a few of the key ingredients and things to consider:-

• Who is the audience for the presentation?
• How is the presentation going to be delivered?
• What are the business objectives of the presentation?
• What sort of environment will the presentation be shown in?
• Develop Flow and narrative / story
• Craft Clear Concise Messages
• Engage with stunning visuals and metaphors
• Creativity
• Consistent, but not boring, branding 
• Interesting and well designed layouts 

‍

Audience

‍

Consider the likely personality types of your audience. Are they detailed oriented? Are they highly technical? Are they likely to have a low attention span? Perhaps they are marketing people and used to seeing highly polished marketing content. Perhaps they are medical or scientific people and used to seeing highly detailed technical information. 

The level of detail and how visual your presentation needs to be can really vary depending on the audience that is going to see your presentation. 

At the very least, when you are designing and assembling your presentation, have the audience in mind as you are doing so.

How is the presentation going to be delivered?

• In person at a conference or event
• One to one and face to face
• Online webinar
• Published online or on an intranet
• Emailed to a person(s)

The way your presentation reaches you audience may well influence the design. For example if your presentation is part of an online webinar, you will want the presentation slides to be highly engaging and visually rich to ensure maximum engagement. You may want to go light on the content on each slide if you are talking through you presentation. The temptation to simply read from your slides is high, however, this is a mistake. Use your slides to support and enhance what you are presenting.

If your presentation is going to be sent out to people or posted online, you may have to include more information on the slides as you will not be there in person to present the information. Having said that, try to avoid highly populated slides and try to split up your text heavy slides into multiple slides. Also, make sure to use visual hierarchy by varying your text sizes and graphics so that the most information on the slide is the most prominent.

Presentation Objectives

Think about what you want to achieve with your presentation, for example :-

• Influence a decision
• Gain funding for a project
• Change minds
• Get people on board with a new idea
• Update people with critical information
• Inspire and motivate people
• Educate and train people

One of the most important things you can do in your presentation is create a clear call to action. Do not be afraid to state what you would like people to do after your presentation. State a next steps. It does not have to be huge but you do want your to move things forward. At the end of your presentation, summarise and recap on your messages. Don't leave them with a long list of takeaways. They won't remember them. 2 or 3 takeaways would be ideal. Also, if you can think of a visual metaphor(s) for your takeaways, even better.

The Presentation Environment

By environment we literally mean where is the presentation going to be shown, for example :-

• On a webinar or virtual meeting
• A town hall update
• At a large event or conference with many hundreds of people
• In a one to one , face to face situation
• In a team meeting, perhaps in a small meeting room with a dozen or so people

The number of people and the size of the room or location should inform the design of your slides.

“I can recount one time we were at a client conference with seating for perhaps 150 people. There was a stage with, what seemed like a fairly large professional screen, comfort monitors, professional audio…the works. Then the presentations start, a couple of slides in I’m struggling to focus on the four line graphs with multiple categories on the large screen. I’m not even at the back of the room”

My point is, there was far too much information on one slide and the text and graphics were simply too small for the environment that the presentation was being shown in.

Be brave with “not what you put on the slide” but what you leave out

‍

The Flow and Narrative

This is probably the most mis-understood concept when it comes to presentations. Flow is fairly easy to answer. Does you presentation have a logical flow? Is the flow linear? It the flow just a stack of topics? Most people can stack a logical order of items together and create a slide deck that makes logical sense. However, what happens when you really want to engage your audience on a much deeper, emotional level? This is where the power of business storytelling comes into play.

Now, I won’t go into full details of how to put a story together here. We’ve spent a decade perfecting ways to teach business people how to tell effective stories so you can see the workshops we offer on the subject here. However, one piece of advice I would give you in relation to presentations and using storytelling is this :

Get Real

Now that’s not a dig at anyone. It simply means including real life events, people, places and using language and visual metaphors to bring them to life. In order to do this, it will take practice, creativity, passion and being able to dig deep within your own experiences (or other peoples) to uncover the goldmine of human experiences. This is what, us as human beings, can relate to and are inspired by. 

The danger and trap most business people fall into (and who would blame them, as we in business are rather conditioned to communicate in this way) is communicating in business concepts that are dry and forever being diluted the more they are used. In order to really connect with people, bring your communication down from “Blue sky thinking” back to planet earth where humans reside. 

Check out our Introduction to Business Storytelling Workshop if you want to learn more.

Messages

Unless you are purely presenting technical information, and even then this can apply to some extend, try to keep your slides to 3 or so key messages. One message per slide would be even better. 

If you find yourself mixing up messages on the same slide, ask yourself whether you need to split the slide up into two or more slides.

It’s far better to have more slides that are simple with clear concise messages than a few slides that are crammed with unclear, difficult to digest information.

Visuals and Metaphors

It amazes me how many presentations we see that simply do not take advantage of images. Given that humans tend to process images and visual metaphors far quicker than numbers and other mnemonics, images are sorely under ultilised in business presentations. 

In the early days of presentations, the software, i.e. in most cases Powerpoint, offered us “clip art” as a way to communicate visually. Tip “Don’t use clip art!” This dated extremely quickly and looks unprofessional.

We now have multiple sources of images on the internet that we can use, some of which are :-

• ‍Shutterstock.com‍
• Unsplash.com‍
• Istockphoto.com‍
• stock.adobe.com

And of course there is Microsoft's own image library built into Powerpoint and many, many more...

Another tip : make sure you have the necessary rights to use the images you choose, especially for business/commercial presentations.

Of course, these days we have AI generated images, so as long as you have the ideas and creativity, you can learn to use prompts to wrangle AI into generating the perfect image to communicate and support your message. 

If you want sushi in the shape of Tetris (if you’re younger than me by a fair bit, look up Tetris here, warning it is addictive!) to depict food innovation, AI image generation can deliver. It’s all about the idea.

Sticking with the food theme, want to use a metaphor for a project kick off?

An upside-down carrot for rocket? Why not. It’s all about delighting and surprising the audience. Create the unexpected, be a little playful and break out of the normal habits of business communication.

We’re a big fan of Adore firefly AI image generation, due to it’s advanced prompting and filtering capabilities.

Check it out below :

Once you do have the perfect image, many times people simply do not know how to incorporate that image into their presentation. Often images get placed randomly on the slide as a rectangular image. There is no visual connection between the image and other content on the page. 

We run a presentation design workshop that will show you the fundamentals of slide design and layout. It’s well worth checking out. 

If you want a simple way to make images more interesting and integrated into your slides, use the crop tool in powerpoint and make sure your images go right to the edge of the slide. See the examples below. Try to get creative with your layouts. 

Just some super simple ways to layout your images :-

And if you struggle to find the crop tool in Powerpoint, just click on an image on your slide and you'll see it on the menu here :-

Of course you can place images into any kind of shape in Powerpoint. Circles, ovals, organic irregular shapes. The only limitation is your imagination.

Learn how to place images into all kinds of shapes in this workshop 

Creativity

This is a big topic and we’re seeing a worrying trend where the same ideas are being recycled time and time again. I guess this can be in part down to the emergence of tools such as Chatgpt and the like. The problem is that these tools are trained on what already exits on the internet. And what exists on the internet has been put there by humans. There is definitely some creative merit in coming up with prompts to feed the AI models, the problem arises when we substitute original human thinking with AI generated thinking. 

Do not short cut creativity. Try to come up with your own original ideas. They will come from your own life experiences. They are unique to you. Only you can string together your own experiences and knowledge into ideas and creative ways to present your ideas. 

Finally on creativity, create the right environment for creativity to thrive. If you’re a leader, make sure your teams have a safe space to develop creative ideas and don’t be too quick to judge every idea that is presented, however irrelevant it may seem at the time. Creativity is a state of mind, so if creativity is not forth coming, you probably need to change states. Use what method works for you :-

• Go for a run / walk
• Work on a totally different task
• Take a shower
• Watch a movie
• Read a book that you won’t normally choose
• Go to a museum 
• Doodle (even if you think you can’t draw)
• Listen to music

Branding

For professional presentations it’s super important to make sure you are on brand and your presentation looks as though it has come from that brand. If you’re a large organisation, you’ll probably have brand guidelines. Some may feel that their brand guidelines can restrict their creativity when it comes to slide design, however, it’s how you use and interpret those brand guidelines that matter. They are there to make sure everything remains consistent, and rightly so.

One of the basic elements of your brand visual identity will be colour. Make sure you understand colour theory and how your brand colours fit together to form your branding system. 

As well as colour, you may also have additional brand assets, such as shapes, textures, fonts. Basically any visual elements that your brand uses to communicate and set it’s tone of voice. Look out for these elements as you may well be able to replicate them across your slides for that strong branded look.

I write about the topic of brand repetition in more detail here.

Presentation Layouts

The layout of your presentation slides is crucial. Every slide you create does not have to follow the same layout. If you have a basic template and every slide you create has exactly the same layout, that’s a sure way to induce visual fatigue on your audience. They’ll become slide blind.

Your content should inform the layout you use. Your layouts should have a clear visual hierarchy that guides the audience through your content with use. 

Great looking and creative layouts are achieved through understanding the relationship between all your assets on the slide i.e your type/copy, images/photos, diagrams, charts, icons. How they are combined, the space between them, their size, their colour, their shape are all aspects that will influence your slide layout.

Of course understanding this and doing it are quite different. Your may want to consider attending one of our Foundation Presentation Design workshops to take a deeper dive into the topic of creating great presentation layouts.

If you are new to Presentation Design, we’d suggest starting with simple layouts as you build up your skills and confidence.

Once you have created a number of layouts that you are happy with, you can always convert your layouts into master template layouts and use placeholders for any of the images so that you can reuse the layout and just insert new images and copy.

Here are just a few simple examples of layouts (intentionally blank and white so you can just see the form) you can use for your next presentation. Obviously, there can be endless variations. 

If you liked this post, please do share the link with anyone you think would benefit from this information.

‍